What does Rick wish he learned in Engineering School

1% of leaders are responsible for most success. Good leaders need to have:

market vision

technical vision

drive, so that they can get things done

leadership

A simple math tells us that a number of people that have all those skills developed above average is very small. Lesson: pick your leaders wisely.

Suboptimal decision is better than no decision.

Trust in an organization is inversely proportional to distance. That e.g. explains why everyone went to develop their own versions of Unix (Irix, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX etc.) even though it was in their best interest to cooperate - the couldn't get to trust each other that co-operatively developed version would fill their needs.

Engineers follow the leader. An example of a project where everyone was moved except the leader - soon all the engineers resigned from the project.

Organizations are self-preserving. The book "Survival is not enough" talks more about this. Successfull organizations resist change because they have a winning strategy. The danger is that they are likely to miss the next winning strategy.

You needs more pigs than chickens (committed people vs. just participants). The analogy comes from ham & eggs breakfast: pig is committed, chicken just participates.

Most research and startups won't succeed.

Innovation will happen elsewhere - no matter how big you are, you can't hire all the smart people in the industry.

You have to sell your ideas.

Don't base a risky project on another risky one.

Know your customer, eat your own dogfood.

Being first is more important than being best (from the book "The 22 immutable laws of marketing".) Some people think different. Allan Cooper and Jakob Nielsen say that it's more important to have a good product later than bad product right now and debunk the "first mover" advantage. Maybe it's about finding the proper balance?

Catch the wave of new markets and technology. If you catch the wave you might end up very well off even if you make tons of mistake (Internet Bubble, anyone?). But a new wave doesn't happen often.

Physics overcome fine print. Natural tendencies will take over the relationship regardless of the arrangements you might make.